Regulated and Unregulated Big Data Analytics as (Re)Makers of Complex Educational Assemblages

• In Event: Undoing and revisioning educational research, policy, and reform

Proposal

Drawing on assemblage theory (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987; DeLanda, 2006), this conceptual paper seeks to provide an analytical lens for the examination of the power and capacity of big data analytics to exercise territorializing and deterritorializing effects on compound polities and supranational organizations. More specifically, the modern massive agglomeration of data streams and the accelerated computational power available to sort and channel them in effecting actions, decisions and reconfigurations in contemporary assemblages, necessitate new exploratory tools to examine the impact of such trends on educational phenomena in comparative perspective.

In the first part, the paper builds an analytical instrumentarium useful in theoretically elucidating the effects of big data on complex assemblages and to serve as methodological extensions in investigating the ramifications of these effects on educational systems, spaces and policyscapes. The second part sets out to illustrate how assemblage theory can explain the tension between the formal use of large official statistical data sets as a type of “regulated” big data, and the informal use of social media, as a type of “unregulated” big data, to construct or deconstruct, respectively, interlacing/interlocking components of assemblages, such as supranational organizations or compound polities. The EU is taken as an example of complex assemblage in which the long-standing utilization of Eurostat data has served as a territorializing force in consolidating policy logics and in legitimizing decision-making at EU level, while the emergence of “loose” social networking technologies appear to have deterritorializing effects when employed deliberately to delegitimize or subvert socio-political processes across the EU.

As evocations of emergence and heterogeneity (Marcus & Saka, 2006), assemblages are flexible vehicles for the construction, reconstruction and deconstruction of policy spaces (Koyama & Varenne, 2012). With the increasing decentralization of policy definition and dispersal of policy across multiscalar and multispatial dimensions over the educational landscape, assemblages in education can be understood as reconfigurations of policy imperatives and technologies aimed at the redefinition of educational governance geometries. Large-scale digital data sets act as catalysts for this reconfiguration of policy intent placed at intersecting intra- and inter-organizational jurisdictions into diffuse assemblages with overlapping and sometimes competing loci of control. Hence, the digitization and algorithmization of education governance (Williamson, 2016) via massive data flows for the efficient monitoring and administration of educational systems at increasing velocities is representative of the multiplicity of the rapid digital scaffolding occurring at various spatial and temporal junctures in the governance of education, ultimately engendering complex educational assemblages.
Within and on the perimeters of this variable geometry, two countervailing digital forces co-exist in a tense equilibrium in shaping and influencing educational policy and governance. On the one hand, characterized by their highly structured algorithmic power, massive data-sets, big data and predictive analytics operate as regulated instruments of educational surveillance to construct and reconstruct input mechanisms in reinforcing the administration, organization and structuration of educational entities. On the other hand, free-floating social networking platforms, neither sanctioned nor unsanctioned by educational polities, operate as unregulated instruments of educational subversion posing real threats of deconstructing educational processes through counter-pedagogical undercurrents eroding both instructional and bureaucratic norms in education.

In considering the EU as a unit of analysis, its scale(s) as a complex assemblage need to be defined and explained for ontological and epistemological reasons. Ontologically, the EU projects on two dimensions of scale that manifest themselves materially: temporal and spatial. The EU constitutes a gradual accretion of political and bureaucratic competences consolidating over time into an assembly of states bound together by common interests into an enlarging geographical space. Epistemologically, the EU projects on three concurrent dimensions, that confer its expressivity: common destiny, humanistic values and influence. In deliberately casting itself as a vehicle for forging a common European identity, with shared symbols and values, the EU has sought to craft its message as a protector of shared human rights in a disparate union of sometimes diverging interests, but has continuously attempted to exercise its benevolent and pacifist ideals beyond its boundaries.

These normative intents are consistently and concomitantly applied to multiple policy domains, in various degrees of convergence, including in the educational policy sphere. The growing competences the EU has acquired over time in steering educational governance across its assemblage of educational systems have been further reinforced through the use of increasingly sophisticated statistical data sets and big data analytics, made ever more powerful by digitization and algorithmization. The EU routinely uses its statistics powerhouse, Eurostat, to collect, analyze and interpret data across its multitude of policy domains to inform, formulate, enact and regulate legislation. Educational policy and governance are not excepted from this process; on the contrary, it appears to increase in density and intensity as the EU’s educational systems become more intricately connected to and dependent on the digital data flows that sustain them. Whereas this regulated space is firmly under the control of the EU, its recent attempts to impose restrictions on the impact of social media in education has yet to materialize. In essence, these counterbalancing sources of digital data are bound to define the delicate dynamics of complex educational assemblages for the foreseeable future.

Comparative inferences are drawn to similar complex educational assemblages, including federal type polities, such as the US, but also to non-governmental supranational organizations like the OECD and UNESCO, to extrapolate the effects of big data analytics to various scales with impact on the redefinition of educational policies and processes in such associations.

Partial Reference List

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

DeLanda, M. (2006). A new philosophy of society: Assemblage theory and social complexity. London, UK: Continuum.

Koyama, J.P., & Varenne, H. (2012). Assembling and dissembling: Policy as productive play. Educational Researcher, 41(5), 157-162. doi:10.3102/0013189X12442799

Marcus, G.E., & Saka, E. (2006). Assemblage. Theory, Culture & Society, 23(2-3), 101-109. doi:10.1177/0263276406062573

Williamson, B. (2016). Digital education governance: An introduction. European Educational Research Journal, 15(1), 3-13. doi:10.1177/1474904115616630

Authors

• Florin Daniel Salajan, North Dakota State University

• Tavis Jules, Loyola University Chicago